From the Archives: Don Hewitt

The legendary newsman passed away last week at the age of 86. Anna Carugati, the group editorial director of World Screen, interviewed him several years ago.

***Don Hewitt***

In 2005, I had the privilege of interviewing Don Hewitt. It was not without trepidation that I prepared for that interview. Not only had he created 60 Minutes, the longest-running show on American television, but during a career spanning more than 50 years at CBS News, Hewitt had created the evening newscast, produced and directed dozens of live news events, and helped shape television coverage of political conventions. I had read his memoirs, I knew he didn’t suffer fools gladly and had somewhat of a temper. Yet, I calmed my nerves with the knowledge that he and I had one thing in common: we both loved TV journalism, especially his baby, 60 Minutes, whose mix of investigative reports, interviews with people in the news and celebrity profiles had set the bar of excellence for a newsmagazine show in the U.S. and around the world.
I recall entering his spacious office and being welcomed by a charming man who cherished and lived by his most famous line—and the secret to the success of 60 Minutes—“Tell me a story.” He proceeded to enthrall me for the next hour with stories from his fascinating career.

Hewitt passed away last week. His legacy lives on and what we discussed during that interview in 2005 is as relevant today as it was then.

WS: To what do you attribute the longevity of 60 Minutes?
HEWITT: A very, very simple formula, which every child in the world knows: Tell me a story. I was directing Ed Murrow’s See It Now, which was very prestigious, but not very popular. And Ed also did another show called Person to Person, which was not very prestigious, but very popular. A phrase was coined about the Murrow shows, “high Murrow and low Murrow.” And I looked at that and thought, “Oh my God, there’s the formula. If you put ‘high Murrow’ and ‘low Murrow’ in the same broadcast, you got a winner.” You can look in Marilyn Monroe’s closet, if you are also willing to look into Robert Oppenheimer’s laboratory. So by mixing up statesmen and symphony conductors and movie stars, it was a formula that couldn’t miss.
Now the idea was to find attractive broadcasters that people could identify with. I grew up at a time when there was Life magazine on every coffee table in America. And I wanted to put a television show in every living room in America. I realized that what Life did was what I wanted to do. It was Jackie Gleason and Dwight Eisenhower, but also they had these great covers, and I said, “I need great covers.” And I latched on to Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner and they were my covers, and then came Ed Bradley and Morley Safer.
I hired Morley Safer, because I loved the way he wrote, because I thought writing was the key to this broadcast. Morley was incredible with essays, and they all understood that this is a broadcast about telling a story. I realized early on that I wasn’t as interested in processing the news of the day, as I was in examining the times in which we live. Whether it happened today or not, it’s happening in our time. Vladimir Horowitz didn’t do anything the day we put him on the air, except that he was part of the times in which we lived.
Is there some showbiz in it? Of course there is. There’s showbiz in every successful enterprise in America. I never thought it was a dirty word to call news entertaining. And anybody who tells you that doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I had to make this program entertaining, and documentaries were not.

WS: Do you have a favorite story?
HEWITT: I guess it was the lighter stories. Ed Bradley with Lena Horne was television at its best. Of the serious stories, my favorite would be Morley Safer going back to the two destroyers, the U.S.S. Maddox and the U.S.S. Turner Joy involved in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam, and coming away with the story that [victory] probably never happened. And every time someone talks to me about how George Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to get us into Iraq, I say, “Yeah and what about Lyndon Johnson talking about the Gulf of Tonkin, where we lost a lot more people than we lost in Iraq?”

WS: We all think of television as the visual medium, but the words and the story are so important.
HEWITT: I think it is your ear, as much as your eye, and maybe more than your eye, that keeps you tuned to the television set. I’ll give you a perfect example. There’s a space launch. [People are watching the launch live]. If the networks lose the picture, and they put up a sign that says, “We’ve lost our picture momentarily,” you’ll wait for it to come back. If they lose the audio, you’re gone, immediately. It’s the audio that kept you there. The minute you can’t make yourself believe you’re actually there, because there’s nobody talking to you or you don’t hear any sound, you’re gone. I realized that a long time ago. So the success of 60 Minutes was mostly the writing.

WS: In this multichannel world, what relevance does a network newscast still have?
HEWITT: None. [Back in the early days of television] publishers were in journalism if they wanted to be. Broadcasters were in journalism because they had to be. The only way you could get a license to broadcast was to do public service [and news was considered public service]. That’s no longer a requirement for broadcasting, because broadcasters don’t use the airwaves, they use cable. People pay for it. So there’s no compelling reason to be in news anymore. I would venture a guess that in the next five years, ABC, NBC and CBS will each have news channels of their own and relegate news to [them].
I grew up at a time when all of America waited for the evening newscast every night to find out what had happened [during the day]. There’s no one in America that doesn’t know what happened by seven o’clock. In addition to cable news networks, your car is saturated with all-news radio. I don’t think there’s an office in America that doesn’t leave CNN or MSNBC or FOX News on all day long. And when something important happens, people watch.
So what I’ve suggested to CBS, on how to retool the Evening News, is to take a lead from newspapers, the appeal of which is columnists. People read columnists. I said, “OK, you’re trying to reach a college audience, and you’re not succeeding because they are not watching news. Suppose every night you had an Andy Rooney for a minute and a half at the end of the newscast, or Jon Stewart, or Ellen DeGeneres. You would begin to attract a college crowd that loves that acerbic, irreverent “Give ’em hell!” attitude that you get from columnists. The day of the “who, what, why, where, when” is disappearing because the audience knows who, what, why, where, when.

WS: Bill Paley, the founder of CBS, was adamant about keeping entertainment and news separate.
HEWITT: All of us subscribed to the Paley theory that you build two towers. In one you put entertainment. In the other you put news. And the success of one will rub off on the other, but you build a wall so they don’t go back and forth. That’s great and all of us subscribed to that, but we don’t mind climbing over that wall to get an entertainment-sized paycheck for what we do on this side of the wall. So there is a certain amount of hypocrisy among all of us.

WS: You directed the first televised presidential debate, between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. What was that like?
HEWITT: Jack Kennedy was Cary Grant. That night, he walked into that room, he looked like a Harvard undergrad, perfectly tailored, he was tan, he was in command, he looked like he owned the world. Nixon had a staph infection. He looked green. He had banged his knee on the car. He looked like death warmed over. So it was no contest. That night, incidentally a historic night, we got the right guy for the wrong reason. You shouldn’t pick a president according to who’s the better looking of the two. You should pick Mr. America that way, but not your president. But we did and we got the right guy.
You know what was wrong about that night? That was the first night that politicians looked at us in television and said, “That’s the only way to run for office.” And we looked at them and said, “That’s a bottomless pit of advertising dollars.” From that day on, no one can even think about running for office in the greatest democracy on earth unless they’ve got money for television time. And you can’t get money for television time unless you are doing something with a lobbyist you shouldn’t be doing. A word was born that night called “fundraising.” I had never heard about fundraising before. In politics it’s called fundraising, in business it’s called bribery. You’re giving money at a fundraiser to get someone to do what you want them to do. Politics in American has been ruined by television because it’s become a money game. If you don’t have the money, don’t even think about it.

WS: Do you have any fears that in five years, 60 Minutes will become softer?
HEWITT: In five years? How about right now?! The number one word in television these days is “demographics.” There is an obsession with youth that comes from the theory that people over a certain age are so wedded to certain brands—they are not going to change their toothpaste, their shaving cream, their lipstick—and therefore who needs them? Kids can be persuaded one way or another. I don’t know if I believe that.
Look, Paley, David Sarnoff [former owner of NBC] and Len Goldenson [former owner of ABC] owned the networks, so they created them in their own image. GE, Viacom and Disney don’t own the networks, their shareholders do. They have to cater to the wishes of shareholders, so that’s the determining factor. The pride of being number one no matter what you put on the air is an epidemic in this business because you have to please the shareholders. If you don’t please the shareholders, you’re out of a job. So there is no one determining, “What is going to make me proud and rich at the same time,” which is what I thought about.

WS: What can be done on TV to get young people to watch news?
HEWITT: It takes imagination, and I think imagination is in very short supply these days.